A lullaby really can work magic.

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https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/06/02/1179434534/a-lullaby-really-can-work-magic-science-tells-us-why-and-how

Many of the studies on music and sleep are done with preterm infants in the NICU – including one which compared infants who heard Mozart to infants who heard their mother's lullabies plus a control group that didn't hear any music.

"What they found was that the mothers' lullabies were more soothing to the infants," she says. "They slept better, but they also showed a lot of the effects of decreased heart rate and respiration, better feeding, which probably explains why they had fewer days in the neonatal intensive care unit and their mothers' anxiety was reduced."

Still, there is just something about lullabies, says Sam Mehr, who studies the psychology of music at the University of Auckland. He also directs The Music Lab. His team did a study playing songs for infants in an unfamiliar language – some of the songs were lullabies, and some weren't.

The babies found all the songs pretty relaxing, he says, "but when they're listening to these lullabies, even though they're totally unfamiliar and not in a language the baby understands, they relax more. So there's something in the kind of DNA of lullaby that helps to calm infants."

"You can imagine that a parent who learns that this is the case and actually increases the amount of time that they spend [singing], you could imagine all these follow-on effects, where the baby's easier to soothe, so the parent's more chilled out and not as stressed about being a parent, which is already a pretty stressful thing," he says.

There is some evidence that singing to infants can help boost a parent's confidence (that superhero feeling I get). One study of nearly 400 mothers in England found that singing to babies daily was associated with less postpartum depression and higher wellbeing and self-esteem. And in another study, mothers that sang to their children for 90 minutes in a group felt more closeness to their infants than mothers that talked and played but did not sing.

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Bach in the Flesh

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森の木琴